Law Commons^™

Commentary: Hospital Tax-Exempt Policy: A Comparison Of Schedule H And State Community Benefit Reporting Systems, Laura L. Hitchcock

Frontiers in Public Health Services and Systems Research

In Hospital Tax-Exempt Policy: A Comparison of Schedule H and State Community Benefit Reporting Systems, Rosenbaum et aldescribe the numerous variations between current state law in 24 states and federal requirements regarding nonprofit hospitals’ community benefit activities. The potential for nonprofit hospitals to help shape community health is great, and how states choose to address requirements regarding community benefit, and potentially reinforce the new federal requirements to incentivize hospital participation in addressing root causes of poor health, should be of significant interest to the public, policy makers and public and population health experts, given the large percentage of …

Carrots, Sticks And False Carrots: How High Should Weight Control Wellness Incentives Be? Findings From A Population-Level Experiment, Harald Schmidt

Frontiers in Public Health Services and Systems Research

Employers are increasingly using wellness incentives, including penalties for unhealthy behavior. Survey data suggests that people are willing to accept the principle of penalizing those perceived to take health risks, but the equally relevant question of the magnitude of acceptable penalties is unclear.

While the principle of penalizing overweight and obese people has some support, findings from a population-level experiment (n=1,000) suggest that the acceptable size of penalties is comparatively small, around $50: more than 10-fold below levels favored by advocates. Reward-based incentives are favored over penalty-based ones by a factor of 4. Of two different ways of framing penalty …